Linux

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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Noob Question Thread: Ask Any Questions About Linux! (lemmy.ml)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I thought I'll make this thread for all of you out there who have questions but are afraid to ask them. This is your chance!

I'll try my best to answer any questions here, but I hope others in the community will contribute too!

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

Hyperland. Don't know. Apparently reading someone else's comment, it has to do with Wayland.

Which leads to answering out of order about Wayland and Xorg. Both are windowing systems, major components of the GUI/desktop environment. Xorg, aka X or X11, is older than Linux; it dates back to the early 80's. It just wasn't designed to handle things like multiple monitors with variable refresh rate and all the wacky stuff we have now. It's amazing it's hung on this long but the sober fact is X is old and busted.

Wayland is the new hotness meant to replace Xorg. It works a bit different, some old software won't work with it so there have to be converters, and there's some issues with Nvidia compatibility with Wayland. There are very few people who just want to stubbornly stay with X, but Wayland still doesn't work well for their use case, which is why there is much discussion about it.

I use the CLI for things like making and moving files for a lot of reasons.

I'm interacting with another machine through SSH
I'm maintaining a server that has no GUI installed
I'm doing something kind of weird like using scp to send a file from one computer to another via an SSH tunnel
I'm working on a large batch of files.
I'm doing something complex or multi-part to a bunch of files.

For example, when I ripped my DVD collection, I had an issue where the software generated file names like S4D2E3.mp4, or Season 4 Disc 2 Episode 3. I was able to copy-paste a list of the episode names of an entire season into a text file, and then using the CLI I iterated through the lines of that file renaming each video file and moved it to the correct storage directory. Saved a lot of manual F2ing.

Of course, I didn't type those lines of bash each time, I saved it as a script and then ran that each time.

Learn a little bit of regex, how to use vim, how pipes work, and a bit about stuff like imagemagick or pandoc or ffmpeg and you'll see why Bash is so handy.